In the Time of the Americans Read online

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  Daisy Miller was inspired by a story James had heard of a young American girl traveling in Italy with her mother in the winter of 1876–77, who in all innocence had picked up acquaintance with a good-looking young Italian man without understanding either the need for a proper introduction or the rules that required her to associate only with persons of suitable background. The point of the anecdote was its ending: when the girl later was introduced into Roman society, she was, predictably, snubbed—and was surprised.

  In James’s telling, of course, the tale took on new dimensions. The Daisy Miller he created was intended to typify Americans in virtues as well as faults. Superficial, uninformed, and always on the move, Daisy was oblivious of the impression she created on the Europeans she met in her travels. In turn the Europeans, to whom her naturalness and openness were incomprehensible, misinterpreted her character and actions. In Rome, not realizing how such behavior would be viewed by Italian society, she visited the Colosseum after dark, unchaperoned and alone with a male companion. She contracted a fever in the night air—a malaria from off the marshes—and died of it.

  That it was unhealthy for Americans to breathe the corrupt air of Europe was at least one reading of the story; and perhaps the oddest thing about it was that it was written by Henry James, whose subtle tales of the mutual misunderstandings of Americans and Europeans were informed by a sense that these misunderstandings were within the family. The peer of Flaubert and Turgenev, James, who lived in England and was at home in France and Italy, symbolized an essential unity of European and American culture of which turn-of-the-century America was becoming ever more aware.

  James, the great American author, resided in the English countryside. In 1907 his friend Edith Wharton, the novelist of old New York, established herself and her salon in Paris in the aristocratic Faubourg Saint-Germain. Boston-bred Bernard Berenson, the art critic, lived in the hills above Florence. Henry Adams spent months of each year traveling in Europe.

  In the steamship era travel had become easy; and eastern America was being drawn into ever closer intimacy with western Europe. Even in other parts of the United States, feelings about Europe were starting to turn around—a movement more easily discerned in retrospect than at the time. About Great Britain in particular, a turnabout in sentiment was under way. There was relief in both countries when they did not go to war against one another in the Venezuela crisis of 1895, and with the relief came a consciousness—at least on the part of some—of the madness it would have been for kindred peoples to fight. Americans were put in an especially good mood by Britain’s decision to make the principal concession: she bowed to the American demand that the whole of the Venezuela matter be submitted to arbitration.

  Britain’s willingness to give in to American demands was due in part to her recognition that, challenged by the rising power of the newly united German empire, she might one day want or need the support of the United States. Though Washington in the nineties was still a sleepy, provincial town not much larger than Lima or Bogotá, the United States was becoming a power, and was being recognized as such: in 1892 the major European countries raised their legations in Washington to the status of embassies.

  When America went to war against Spain in 1898, Great Britain gave further proofs of friendship by holding the line for the United States in Europe, restraining great power adversaries of the Americans from throwing their weight on the Spanish side. Without explicitly asking for anything in return, Great Britain acted the part of an ally.

  On a personal level, as the growing number of society marriages between Britons and Americans attested, relations between the two countries were becoming closer. Transatlantic romance was in the air, as was transatlantic friendship. Cecil Spring-Rice, the British diplomat who became his country’s ambassador to the United States, was best man at Theodore Roosevelt’s wedding in London; and while the political importance of personal relationships can be overstated (Henry Cabot Lodge, Roosevelt’s political ally, though immensely fond of Spring-Rice, “hated his country”), it seems not unlikely that “Springy’s” informed and lucid analyses of European politics may have exerted some influence on the thinking of his American friends. In Washington, Spring-Rice occupied a privileged position unique for a foreigner, as one of the happy few admitted to the circle of Henry Adams (there were only six for breakfast and four for dinner at 1603 H Street, the Adams residence): a circle that seemed to be central to American policy making at the beginning of the twentieth century, for it included the majority party’s foreign policy theorist in the Senate, the secretary of state, and Theodore Roosevelt.

  ON SEPTEMBER 5, 1901, President McKinley, in his scheduled speech touching on America’s new role in the world, told an audience of perhaps 50,000 at the Buffalo fair that the days of isolationism were over. America’s wealth, he said, so great as to be “almost appalling,” should inspire the country to bring wealth to countries less fortunate. New communications and transportation technologies had made the world one: “The same important news is read, though in different languages, in all Christendom”; and the speed of modern ocean liners was so great that distance had been abolished. The Atlantic no longer separated North America from Europe. “God and man have linked the nations together,” he said, and “No nation can longer be indifferent to any other.” The conclusion, according to the President, was inescapable: “Isolation is no longer possible or desirable.”

  ON FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, the day after delivering his address, the President returned to the Exposition to enjoy himself. At four o’clock that afternoon, in the Temple of Music, he attended a scheduled reception: he shook hands with the crowds of visitors as they filed in to meet him, a chore to some politicians but not to McKinley, who took pleasure in it.

  A little before 4:10, a man approached the President and shot him twice with a pistol. The man held no grudge against McKinley, but was an anarchist who believed all government to be wrong. He stood where he was, making no move to escape. McKinley said: “Don’t let them hurt him.”

  After a week in which hopes rose and fell, McKinley died in the early hours of Saturday, September 14.

  Unpredictable Theodore Roosevelt, at forty-two the youngest chief executive in the nation’s history, became the twenty-sixth President of the United States.

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  THE ENERGIES OF TR

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT, a restless bundle of energy, came to power at the start of a new century that was expected to be an electric age. Typically, the handbook to the Buffalo exposition proclaimed that “the electrical features are said to exceed in variety, in novelty, and in quantity, those of all other expositions.” One of the best-remembered theories of Henry Adams, fascinated by the dynamos he inspected at the Chicago and Paris world fairs, was that the dynamo was making history obsolete: that experience gained when humans had only the strength of animals, winds, and waves to augment their own had become largely irrelevant. The rising availability of mechanical power was the new thing: in 1898 the world generated 10,000 times more of it than in 1820, and more was being generated all the time. The genies were out of the bottle, and with their help all was possible: humans could descend to the floors of the oceans, explore the far side of the moon, fly among the stars. In intuiting that the twentieth century would be an era of energy, Henry Adams saw truly. Young people who visited the Buffalo exposition one day would read in their newspapers that Americans, by releasing atomic energy, had brought down fire from the sun.

  The relative invention rate had reached the highest point in history by the turn of the century; Thomas Edison had invented professional inventing; and nowhere did inventions—the elevator, the bicycle, the typewriter, the camera, the auto—enter into everyday use more rapidly than in the United States. It seemed right that kinetic Theodore Roosevelt, who was always in motion, should become President in an era of change in which, for the first time, humans could travel speedily.

  To countrymen and foreigners alike, Theodore Roosevelt—TR, as he cam
e to be called—was characteristically American to the point of caricature. The improbable stories of his life were as well known as the tales they most resembled: the boys’ adventure stories that were so popular in that bygone era of dime novels. The weakling who turned the tables on his tormentors by learning to box. The sickly lad who went west and became a man among men. The eastern dude with the Harvard drawl who learned to be a cow-puncher in the Badlands of the Dakota Territory, lived clean, did not swear or drink or smoke, but won the admiration of even the toughest gunslingers. The deputy sheriff who tracked down horse thieves with a Winchester rifle in his arms and a copy of Anna Karenina in his saddlebags. The weak-eyed historian who, in the field, transformed himself into the mighty hunter of birds and beasts. The aristocratic New York City police commissioner, attired in silk cummerbund, who smashed crime and corruption with a gloved but iron fist, and who, while others slept, roamed the streets by night to see that the laws were enforced. The young civil commissioner who, in the words of the then President of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, “wanted to put an end to all the evil in the world between sunrise and sunset.” Having urged the United States into the 1898 war against Spain and sent the American fleet to take the Philippines, TR resigned his desk job as assistant secretary of the navy to fight in the field, emerging as the hero of the war by leading his Rough Riders in the charge up San Juan Hill.

  TR had two marriages and six children, spoke or read seven foreign languages, and wrote fourteen books in his spare time. As President, he was the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize; he made Panama a country; and he left his mark on the face of the planet by building the Panama Canal. TR’s energies have astounded posterity almost as much as they dazzled his contemporaries; and it is not surprising that, to many in the generation of his young kinsman Franklin D. Roosevelt, TR seemed to be the greatest man in the world.

  THE UNITED STATES, which had plunged into financial disaster in the early 1890s, was beginning a prolonged upswing in the McKinley/TR administrations. In 1900 the country produced a third of the world’s steel, pig iron, silver, gold, and coal, and more than half the world’s cotton, corn, copper, and oil. From then to 1910 the gross national product (GNP) grew 50 percent, the manufacturing component of GNP 100 percent, and steel production nearly 200 percent. Telephones rose 600 percent; the number of motor vehicles registered jumped from 8,000 to 458,000—and to 8 million a decade later.

  But in this explosion of production and distribution, forces had been let loose with which TR felt obliged to do battle. The enormous new wealth was concentrating power on a scale hitherto unimaginable, and concentrating it in the hands of private interests that dwarfed the government. Between 1897 and 1903, some 40 percent of the country’s industrial output was merged into giant corporate trusts. The banker J. P. Morgan exercised control over so many companies that Morgan-reorganized railroad corporations alone had half as much annual revenue as the government of the United States did. In the panics of 1893 and 1907, Morgan was able to save the country from financial collapse.

  What shocked some was that private interests were so powerful. What shocked TR was that the government, which alone represents the public interest, was so weak. Where others wanted to break up, and therefore weaken, private concentrations of wealth through antitrust laws, TR was more inclined to push for a bigger government that would regulate, not destroy, industrial combines, and that would be strong enough on the positive side to achieve national goals and pursue national greatness.

  He told Congress that his program was “the enlargement of the scope of the functions of the National Government required by our development as a nation.” It was a call for a break with the country’s small-government past, and as such it was of a piece with the un-American program that the supposedly most typical of Americans urged upon the United States in foreign affairs.

  TO BEGIN WITH the most heretical of his views, TR, unlike his countrymen, and even more unlike his countrywomen, was in favor of warfare: he thought it health-giving. He despised the peace-lovingness of the moneyed classes of his day, and feared that Americans might grow soft with easy living. He believed in the survival of the fittest, considered the manliest to be the fittest, and felt that manliness, which was the result of a strenuous life, was best earned and proved on the field of battle.

  This ran so contrary to the sentiment as well as the traditions of the country that TR was obliged to emphasize that the military and especially naval preparedness programs he advocated would, by deterring potential enemies, help to keep the peace. But it was not easy to convince Americans of this, for they were inclined to believe just the reverse. They had always thought that large standing armies were the creatures of monarchical Europe, that they are ruinous to a civil society, and that arms races bring war while disarmament brings peace.

  Of course, these traditional American opinions were not entirely consistent with American actions. Territorial expansion often had involved the United States in fighting, whether against Indians or others, and Americans had always aimed at expansion—within the Western Hemisphere. To that extent TR’s countrymen, though they did not recognize it, were as bellicose as he was. TR was in the mainstream American tradition of John Quincy Adams when he wrote that “ultimately every European power should be driven out of America, and every foot of American soil, including the nearest islands in both the Pacific and the Atlantic, should be in the hands of independent American states, and so far as possible in the possession of the United States or under its protection.…” But TR left the mainstream far behind whenever he inclined toward establishing an empire overseas—the very thing the United States had denounced in asserting its own right to independence from Great Britain.

  At times, then, TR spoke the language of an imperialism that mainstream Americans had always disavowed. Also unlike his countrymen, TR had an instinctive feel and sympathy for the balance-of-power politics that Europe practiced and other Americans deplored. In his more lucid moments, he saw—and was one of the few who saw—that the growing power of Germany would one day threaten the United States, and that it would be in America’s interest to back Great Britain against Germany.

  But TR was realistic about how little support there was for many of his views on both foreign and domestic policy in the Republican party or in the country at large, whose leader, in both cases, he had become only by accident.

  Indeed, TR was not only a more realistic but also a more complex thinker than his public personality suggested, or than his former patrons divined: he was underestimated not only by businessmen and politicians, but also by most of those in the Henry Adams circle who supposedly knew him best. Henry James privately considered TR “a dangerous and ominous jingo” and “the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding noise.” Henry Adams, who remarked that TR “acts by the instinct of a school-boy at a second-rate boarding school” and that “mind, in a technical sense, he has not,” claimed that TR misunderstood why his friends were so fascinated by his presidency: “Theodore is blind-drunk with self-esteem. He has not a suspicion that we are all watching him as we would watch a monkey up a tree.…” Secretary of State John Hay and others in the Adams social set found it hard to come to terms with the fact that TR, about whose adolescent self-dramatization they had made so many amusing comments, had become their chief; Hay told TR that other than in doing official business, he would refer to him not as “Mr. President,” but as “Theodore.”

  The nation’s youth, however, responded to TR with enthusiasm, and never more conspicuously than in 1912, in the aftermath of his presidency, when their elders stood against him.

  TR EMBARKED ON a well-publicized career of adventure when he handed over the presidency to his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, in 1909. He hunted big game. He rode in one of the first airplanes. He traveled the world.

  It should have been predictable, however, that he would come back to politics. Like an opera star whose latest farewell tour is nev
er the last, he craved the limelight. Even if his successor had carried on the good fight, he might have been tempted to return; as it was, the temptation proved irresistible. Taft, amiable but indolent, was not a man, let alone a President, in TR’s mold. Taft was the last President of the United States to ride to his inaugural in a horse and buggy; TR was the first current or former President to fly.

  Taft, as TR saw it, had been weak. Ignoring how little trust-busting his own administration had undertaken, TR charged that Taft had allowed the owners and representatives of concentrated wealth to take back control of the Republican party and of the government. TR, who had given Taft the presidential nomination in 1908, was determined to wrest it from him in 1912. To deny an incumbent President his own party’s renomination is no small undertaking, but like his political emblem, the bull moose, an animal that can weigh 1,000 pounds and stand seven feet tall, TR was an outsize figure.

  In his quest to regain the presidency, TR, like a Hindu deity, became at once destroyer and creator. In the past he had broken with traditional American ideas. Now he also smashed things—the existing structures of American politics—and opened the way for new ones to be built in their place. For Roosevelt was far and away the most popular man in the country, and his collision with the parties changed the face of American politics.

  When the masters of the Republican party, disregarding public support for TR, renominated Taft, Roosevelt became the presidential nominee of the newly formed Progressive party—a nomination that otherwise had seemed to be destined for Robert La Follette. In doing so, TR shattered both the Republican and Progressive camps. For half a century the Republicans had been the majority party, but TR reduced them temporarily to third-party status: Taft, with only 3.5 million votes, came in third out of three in the 1912 elections. The Progressives, once the progressive wing of the Republican party, had put together an imaginative and constructive program responsive to the needs of twentieth-century America under the leadership of middle western and western reformers who were brimming over with ideas, and hoped to establish a lasting presence on the national scene; but when TR converted the party into a personal vehicle for the 1912 race, he ruined its chances (despite a second-place finish with 4.25 million votes) of becoming anything else.